Nonfiction.

Missing Mr. Jordan

Two Journalists Search For Chicago's Elusive Superstar

November 19, 1995|By Reviewed by Allen Barra, a writer whose columns on sports appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal.

Rebound:

The Odyssey of Michael Jordan

By Bob Greene

Viking, 275 pages, $22.95

Second Coming:

The Strange Odyssey of Michael Jordan

By Sam Smith

HarperCollins, 281 pages, $23

A few years ago someone estimated that Muhammad Ali had passed up Abraham Lincoln as the most written about human being who ever lived. I don't know if anyone's keeping count, but Michael Jordan has to be gaining on Ali. Since his return to basketball there have been two new titles, "Rebound: The Odyssey of Michael Jordan" by Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Bob Greene and "Second Coming: The Strange Odyssey of Michael Jordan" by Sam Smith, who covers the NBA for the Tribune. If Jordan gives up basketball for professional wrestling, forests from Mexico to Canada are going to be in danger.

First, let's dispense with the "Odyssey" stuff. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "odyssey" as "a long, adventurous journey." Both of these books are long for the subject they have to cover--150 pages each would have been sufficient for the information they actually convey--but there is precious little adventure.

Greene's "Rebound" does dispel the mystery as to why Michael Jordan quit basketball to play baseball--he really likes baseball--and why he quit baseball to play basketball again--he couldn't hit a curve ball. I'm glad we got that settled. Smith's "Second Coming" confirms that Jordan really doesn't like Scottie Pippen as a person (who does?) but wanted him on the team because he was a winner. In other words, don't expect revelations.

By the way, if you're having a flash of deja vu, it's because both Greene and Smith have written books about Jordan before: Greene's "authorized" Jordan book, "Hang Time," appeared in 1992, and Smith's "unauthorized" one, "The Jordan Rules," in 1991. Surely both of those books could have been reissued in paperback with new chapters, but then Greene wouldn't have all the extra space he has in "Rebound" to wander around and come up with things like "What follows in these pages is the diary of a journey--a chronicle recorded from inside an odyssey that, I am convinced, Jordan had no idea he was embarking upon."

I don't know why Greene is trying so hard to convince us of that; I find it very easy to believe that Jordan had no idea he was embarking on his journey. What I have a hard time believing is that Greene really knows how to "record that journey from the inside."

He writes: "Overcome with grief and uncertainty (after his father's death), Jordan made the instinctive decision to do what few men in adult life ever do: start over. He tried to turn himself into who he had been before all the renown and all the privilege and all the adulation--to find out, as a kind of medicine for his grief, if he could do it all over again."

That may or may not be true, but it looks an awful lot like Greene is writing a novel here, because nothing Jordan himself says really clues us into this.

"I'm tired of hearing myself talk," Jordan told Greene when he was ready to break his story about leaving the NBA. "Just go ahead and put it in your own words." Perhaps that's what Jordan told him about this book, too. I won't say Greene doesn't ask tough questions, but if those minor league pitchers had lobbed grapefruits the way Greene does, Michael would have won the batting title.

Smith, of course, was granted zero speaking time with Jordan, having had the temerity to write a book that wasn't approved by the player and his agent. But Smith is a good journalist, and he knows how to make the most out of being denied access. For one thing, he is one of the few writers with the guts to point out that the press has given Jordan a sweetheart deal over the years, and he actually describes the process: "(Jordan) would constantly use the wrong words to describe something, and the writers would get together later in the locker room to decide what it was that he had actually meant to say." (Maybe Jordan should have told them all to "put it in your own words.")

Greene skips around just about any subject that Jordan might find difficult or unpleasant. For instance, he allows the reader to think (as Jordan allowed the public to think) that Jordan did buy his minor league baseball team that much-publicized new bus (as Smith states, Jordan did not buy the bus). The irony is that so much unpleasant stuff still manages to come through in "Rebound," such as Jordan's astonishing statement regarding the major league baseball players during the strike: "What are they being so greedy for? The kind of money they're giving up, they're never going to see again."

Say what? Michael Jordan not only is the world's highest paid athlete-endorser but also the man who fought to decertify his own union because it agreed to a salary cap. And he calls baseball players greedy for wanting to be paid at the market level their employers established in the first place? Free market for me, says Mr. Jordan, but not for thee.

The idea that the baseball players were maintaining solidarity so that all of them, and future players as well, might benefit from free agency doesn't enter into Michael Jordan's universe--or Bob Greene's, either. In fact, there seem to be a great many things in heaven and earth undreamt of in Michael Jordan's philosophy, most of them having to do with what we might call the real world.

Though Greene approaches Jordan from the "inside" while Smith is on the outside, the two pictures, when brought together, are almost barren of detail. Jordan doesn't appear to have any kind of private life; his views on virtually every topic or issue (except his being exempt from the NBA salary cap) are virtually unknown. Is there a "real" Michael Jordan to know? Is the most famous athlete of our time merely the sum total of his endorsements? Perhaps by the time he completes his next odyssey there'll be a real Michael Jordan to write about.